Published in The Broomfield Enterprise, 3/30/08

I stretched on my mat, ready to downward dog and crescent moon my way to well-being, listening to the background chatter about various pills, elixirs and patches used to “even me out”, “give me some balance”, “make me normal again”.

It wasn’t a therapeutic yoga class, taken to repair bodies that have suffered a major accident or trauma—it was just a normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill weekly gym class, but it was filled with women who have had children.

And I have learned that, after children, there simply is no “normal” anymore.

Mother’s bodies, after being awarded the greatest gift of all, will never be the same. Our weight and our shape and our size and our moods and our feelings and our perceptions are forever changed, despite the kicking and screaming requests for the contrary.

It is a universal fact: we mothers are at the mercy of our hormone’s random shifting and ebbing and flowing and the unfortunate side effect is that our husbands are most often left speechless as they watch their loved ones run up the stairs and slam the door while they are uttering “what the hell just happened and where is the woman I fell in love with?”

Men truly have no way of understanding, empathizing or rationalizing how we have come to be this person who’s moods change with the wind’s direction. The male body, after all, changes only once at the age of fourteen, and then stays the same for the remainder of it’s living years.

But if, for just one month, an adult male lived in that fourteen-year-old body—with the changing voice, body growing in awkward spurts, random acne and overwhelming “desires”—he might have a bit more sympathy for what women go through every single month of our lives clear on through to menopause. Only then might that man see that we simply can’t do anything about this craziness.

But we want to. We desperately want to be “normal” again.

We see doctors and endocrinologists. We take pills and apply creams and test our blood, all in an attempt to find out what is “wrong” with us and how to make it better.

When conventional western medicine doesn’t work, we see naturalists and homeopaths and practitioners who examine our tongues and read our eyeballs in an effort to find closure to the insanity and move on with our lives.

And time and time again the overwhelming and unavoidable result is that what seems to be working—if only for a few weeks–simply stops working. When this inevitably happens, we are led to seek out the next healer who promises to read our chakras and auras and energy fields in an attempt to make us better.

Yet the fact remains that we still have a closet full of clothes for each week of the month, depending on whether we feel fat or thin or sexy or bloated or tired or energetic or like our life is helplessly going down the tubes or that things are looking up and we think we finally have it all figured out.

The result is often a powerless exhaustion as we continually try to gain control over the uncontrollable.

Studies show that women are happiest in their fifties, when hormones have ceased ruling our world.

But what to do in the meantime? My “fifties” is twenty years away.

Fine, fifteen.

Fourteen.

The point is it’s a long time.

It’s enough time to keep trying to figure it out, to resist relinquishing control to the elastic section of my closet, to hold out hope that there’s an answer–whether it be from a good tongue-reader or a “therapeutic” institution.

It’s enough time to not give up.

Let’s just hope my husband can last that long.